Fuel from Algae

At the flowayJ. Emmett Duffy, the Loretta and Lewis Glucksman Professor of Marine Science, and Professor of Marine Science Elizabeth Canuel look over the algae flowway on the VIMS Gloucester Point campus.
Photo by Stephen Salpukas

Screen TestAlgae grows on screen media, to be harvested and converted into biofuel.
Photo by Stephen Salpukas

It might seem almost too good to be true, but research at
VIMS may turn our nation’s energy issues inside out, using wild algae to
convert what is now a troublesome pollutant into a fuel that can help power our
cars.

The research, by VIMS professors Emmett Duffy and Elizabeth
Canuel, is part of the collaborative, multi-institutional Chesapeake Algae
Project (ChAP). In addition to Duffy, Canuel, and their graduate students and
technicians, ChAP involves faculty and undergrads in the Biology, Chemistry,
and Physics departments at William and Mary, and researchers at the Smithsonian
Institution, the University of Maryland, the University of Arkansas, and
Western Michigan University. Industry partners are Statoil, Blackrock Energy,
and HydroMentia.

Duffy says that the project’s goal is to “close the loop”
between waste production and energy use. He notes that society’s current energy
model is both unsustainable and polluting—we depend on a finite pool of fossil
fuels to power our machines and fertilize our crops, and suffer when byproducts
like excess carbon dioxide and nitrogen enter our air and water.

The ChAP model aims to reverse this equation. Wild algae can
take up the excess nitrogen that plagues Chesapeake Bay and other coastal
waters, using it to form cells that in certain species contain almost 50%
lipids—oily organic compounds that can be used to make biodiesel and other
transportation fuels. As an added bonus, the non-lipid components of the cell
promise use as an organic fertilizer, thus capturing nutrient runoff that
produces dead zones in coastal waters and placing the nutrients back where they
belong—in farm soils.

The model is also elegant in its simplicity—relying on
naturally occurring strains of wild algae rather than the high-tech,
genetically modified strains being tested in many other labs. “That allows us
to take advantage of the lessons learned by algae during their 3 billion years
of evolution,” says Duffy.

The focus of Duffy and Canuel’s research—in a land-based
flow way at VIMS as well as culture units in the estuary—is to measure the oil
content of various wild algal strains, and to determine how algal growth rates,
oil production, and pollutant scrubbing vary with temperature, salinity, light
levels, and other environmental factors.

Colleagues are conducting similar experiments in floating
harvesters on Lake Matoaka on the William and Mary campus in Williamsburg, and
in the York River alongside VIMS’ Gloucester Point campus. The harvesters also
allow for engineering tests to establish design criteria for use in the
rigorous real-world conditions of the Bay.

These experiments are all part of an overall effort to
better understand how the ChAP concept might scale up to the levels needed to
make an appreciable dent in our nation’s 20-million-barrel per day oil habit.